A seemingly completely harmless traffic situation will completely change the lives of the two main characters of this darkly humorous – dramatic and even thriller series. Even though both Danny (Steven Yeung) and Amy (Ali Wong) are Asian American and both live in Los Angeles, their lives couldn’t be more different. At least that’s how it seems at first, but we’ll understand by the end that they’re both equally angry, angry, frustrated, they feel like they’re unsuccessful and fake, much more alike than they want to admit. A series of stupid decisions will begin after Danny unsuccessfully tries to return some unused items to the store. Upon entering his pick-up, he will run into the kind of traffic jam that anyone who constantly has to drive around the city gets into almost every week.
The driver of that white, fancy-schmancy SUV, that is Amy, will show him the middle finger, and that will make Danny so angry that he will go after her, he will remember her registration and he will not let such rudeness in traffic go just like that. And so their lives will begin to connect and we will begin to get to know them as they continue to try to destroy each other’s lives, and the quarrel that started over a completely banal matter will turn into a matter of life and death. And the author Lee Sung Jin brilliantly combines comedy, drama and thriller as we get to know the characters better. Danny is a Korean who can’t get along and who works as a gardener, but he is always somewhere on the edge of the law.
Danny’s whole family has suffered because of the illegal dealings of his cousin Isaac, who has just been released from prison, and now Isaac is back at Danny and his younger brother Paul. Again, he comes up with some illegal schemes and drags them along, and when we see that, it’s clear to us why Danny is in a situation where such a harmless incident completely throws him off his feet and becomes something he doesn’t want to go over. Amy’s life is completely different. She lives with her husband George (Joseph Lee), the son of a famous Japanese artist, and her daughter in a luxurious house in Los Angeles, and she needs to sell her business for an amount that will provide for them for the rest of their lives.
So even though she is successful, she has a family that loves her and Amy is dissatisfied, unhappy, she fears that due to dedication to her work she has neglected her family, that she has given in too many times when she shouldn’t have. And she also decided that she would not give in to this quarrel and that hers would be the last. We will understand by the end that that road rage and what will follow later on were the trigger for something that would have to happen to both of them at some point anyway, because that dissatisfaction and frustration would explode one day. “Beef” will start (the translation of the name is not beef, but a quarrel) as an eccentric and silly banter, and will turn into something much darker by the end.
It’s another in a series of smart and brilliantly developed series that both satirize today’s society and at the same time bring an insight into the Asian-American community that we haven’t had the chance to see yet. Even though the premise itself is rather silly, one of the reasons why the whole story works is the two main actors who are outstanding and who create people from their characters whose frustrations we can completely understand. When Danny or Amy consciously make one of countless completely idiotic and senseless decisions that will result in additional complications for the other and for themselves, it all seems to make sense. An additional plus of this fun, witty and extremely dynamic series is the outstanding soundtrack that reminded us of some forgotten hits from the turn of the century that apparently both main characters listened to when they were teenagers.